The Health News USA January 17 2018
- Drug chain giant CVS Pharmacy recently today it will take new steps toward letting customers know when an image used on social media or in marketing and in-store materials has been digitally altered. The company is also making a commitment, starting in April, to not materially alter beauty imagery it creates for its stores, website and marketing materials for social media. By 2020, brand partners will be required to use imagery that is not materially altered or will have to include a disclaimer on the imagery that labels it “digitally modified.”
- Kentucky has become the first U.S. state to require that Medicaid recipients work or get jobs training, after gaining federal approval for the fundamental change to the 50-year-old health insurance program for the poor. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued policy guidance on Thursday allowing states to design and propose test programs with such requirements. At least nine additional states, mostly Republican-led, have proposed similar changes to Medicaid: Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin.
- According to a new analysis, rising obesity rates in the U.S. may be responsible for as many as 186,000 deaths per year. The U.S. has seen only relatively modest improvements in mortality rates over the past couple decades, despite public health victories including major reductions in smoking. Death rates tied to cardiovascular disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses, for example, declined more slowly in the U.S. than in any of 13 similarly developed nations between 1999 and 2015.
News on Health Professional Radio. Today is the 16th of January 2018. Read by Tabetha Moreto.
http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/cvs-vows-put-end-altering-beauty-imagery-stores/story?id=52354979
Drug chain giant CVS Pharmacy recently announced it will take new steps toward letting customers know when an image used on social media or in marketing and in-store materials has been digitally altered. The company is also making a commitment, starting in April, to not materially alter beauty imagery it creates for its stores, website and marketing materials for social media. The company’s president, Helena Foulkes, said she recognized that CVS has a responsibility as a retail business whose “customers predominantly are women.” She added:
“The connection between the propagation of unrealistic body images and negative health effects, especially in girls and young women, has been established.”
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The company is introducing a CVS Beauty Mark watermark – a circle with a heart-like shape at the center — that will appear on all imagery in its stores that has not been “materially altered.”
CVS defines materially altered as “changing or enhancing a person’s shape, size, proportion, skin or eye color, wrinkles or any other individual characteristics.”
By two thousand twenty, brand partners will be required to use imagery that is not materially altered or will have to include a disclaimer on the imagery that labels it “digitally modified.” CVS Pharmacy has over nine thousand seven hundred locations. The company made headlines in two thousand fourteen when it announced it would stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products, becoming the first national pharmacy chain to do so.
Kentucky has become the first U.S. state to require that Medicaid recipients work or get jobs training, after gaining federal approval for the fundamental change to the fifty-year-old health insurance program for the poor. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued policy guidance on Thursday allowing states to design and propose test programs with such requirements.
Kentucky’s waiver, submitted for federal approval in two thousand sixteen, requires able-bodied adult recipients to participate in at least eighty hours a month of “employment activities,” including jobs training, education and community service. The Kentucky program also imposes a premium on most Medicaid recipients based on income. Some who miss a payment or fail to re-enroll will be locked out for six months. The new rules will take effect in July.
The rules apply to those between nineteen and sixty four years old. Certain groups are exempted, including former foster-care youth, pregnant women, primary caregivers of a dependent, full-time students, the disabled and the medically frail. The Trump administration also said states would have to make “reasonable modifications” for those battling opioid addiction and other substance-use disorders.
More than four hundred thousand Kentucky residents gained health insurance through the program, the highest growth rate of Medicaid coverage of any state.
At least nine additional states, mostly Republican-led, have proposed similar changes to Medicaid: Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin.
http://time.com/5100737/obesity-lowering-life-expectancy-united-states/
According to a new analysis, rising obesity rates in the U.S. may be responsible for as many as one hundred eighty six thousand deaths per year. The U.S. has seen only relatively modest improvements in mortality rates over the past couple decades, despite public health victories including major reductions in smoking. Death rates tied to cardiovascular disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses, for example, declined more slowly in the U.S. than in any of thirteen similarly developed nations between nineteen ninety nine and two thousand fifteen.
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Increases in obesity, according to the paper, slowed gains in mortality rates by zero point fifty four percent between nineteen eighty eight and two thousand eleven, shaving an estimated zero point nine years off the national life expectancy at age forty and resulting in as many as one hundred eighty six thousand additional deaths in two thousand eleven alone.
The researchers based their projections on the maximum BMIs of more than twenty five thousand two hundred U.S. adults between ages forty and eighty four, and death rate trends from sixteen countries going up to two thousand eleven. The researchers wrote that they used maximum body mass index, rather than baseline measures, because it provides a clearer picture of how excess weight affects health over time.
While the U.S. did have small improvements in mortality during that timespan — it declined by one point fifty three percent among forty to eighty four year-olds — the average decline in the other fifteen countries included in the study was two point twenty one percent. Obesity rates, which are higher in the U.S. than in any of the other included countries, slowed the rate of decline by twenty three percent.
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